Russia Builds First RITM-200 Reactor Unit For Leningrad Nuclear Icebreaker

Russia’s Rosatom State Nuclear Energy Corporation announced that the first RITM-200 reactor unit has been completed for the Leningrad nuclear icebreaker.

The RITM-200 is the new marine reactor for the Russian Navy’s nuclear icebreakers, which include the Arktika, Sibir, Ural, and Yakutia. They are 173 m long, 34 m wide and can break 3 m thick ice. Their top speed is 25 miles in clear waters.

Chukotka nuclear icebreaker is undergoing mooring tests, and the Leningrad and the Stalingrad are at the Baltic Shipyard, undergoing construction.

The Leningrad nuclear icebreaker will have two such reactor units. While the first one is complete, the second is being prepared for hydraulic testing to check for any leaks, after which it will also move to the trial assembly stage.

This is the 13th reactor unit built by the government-owned corporation, and 15 more are currently in different stages of production at several facilities.

The latest unit of the reactor was built at the ZiO-Podolsk plant near Moscow.

The trial assembly was done on May 14, while the keel of the Leningrad icebreaker was laid in 2024.

Every unit of the pressurised water reactor has a thermal capacity of 175 MW, which comes out to 30 MW at the propellers.

Expected to have a 40-year service life, the reactor is 7.3 m high and 3.3 m in diameter, allowing the equipment to be more compact and more powerful than the previous reactors of similar design.

The RITM-200 reactors will also be used for small modular reactor (SMR) nuclear power plants and floating power units.

Russia is also constructing a massive nuclear-powered icebreaker, which will have two RITM-400 reactor units for the proposed Project 10510 class of nuclear-powered icebreakers.

The first vessel of this project will be the Rossiya, with a capacity to break up to 4.3 m of thick ice.